Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground but your Father notices it." (Matthew 10.29).
Even the sparrow and the swallow find shelter in your temple (Psalm 84.3)
So the Bible about sparrows, providence and responsible living.
In a world made already much more precarious by the way we hammer and hack the environment into submission to our self-centred goals, sparrows are an ecological smoke detector. So it should give us even more pause for thought that the house sparrow has declined by around 60% in the last decade. Lock block drives, front gardens turned to parking spaces, the popularity of cheap non-native plants, square kilometres of decking, urban pollution reducing botanically based insects, are only some of the reasons.
Don't know about you – but I'm rapidly running out of optimism about our capacity to reverse the damage we do. The whole depressing story about the decline of the house saprrow can be read here.
Meanwhile, John Clare, the finest writer of poetry about birds, lived in such a close rapport with the natural world that he sensed the significant fragility yet irreplaceable wonder of life for each creature. His own remembered experience of mental ill health (his madness, as he called it) made him uniquely qualified as an advocate of compassion and care for those vulnerable and far from insignificant lives that share our planet, and whose interests intersect with our own.
Let ye then my birds alone,
Come poor birds from foes severe
Fearless come, you're welcome here,
My heart yearns at fate like yours,
A sparrow's life's as sweet as ours.
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